help -- salvaging a 4gb avi file

[pkpara]

---------------------------------------------------------
Too long, dont want to read? : Is there a program that can salvage avi's? Or, at least, dissect them so that even if they are corrupt, or whatever else, you can view and modify them frame by frame?

As a side note, anyone know a good, free program to record skype webcam sessions, and not just screen capture them?
---------------------------------------------------------

I recorded a 2 hour 4gb movie, but it will not play in vlc media player because I-don't-know-what went wrong
(used a screen capture program to capture a family event happening elsewhere through webcam)

I've spent quite some time googling for a solution... here are my results:
-Vlc player opens the file but reports a movie length of 0 seconds
-Video inspector shows the file as a valid, complete, 2hr movie, but won't show a codec required to play it
-virtual dub opens the .avi, but then has to reconstruct some things and says "Index not found or damaged -- reconstructing via file scan. Invalid chunk at 339116 enabling aggressive recovery mode. Keyframe flag reconstuction was not specified in open options and the video stream is not a known keyframe only type. Seeking in the video stream may be extremely slow" and then produces a video clip 50 seconds long from about 4/5 through
-avisplit said "file does not conform to avi standard, can not locate the video strh. this is not an avi file, most likely it has an mpeg structure"

other things have told me that either the file was too big or something else that lead to failure (something like bad stream or --i think-- something having to do with keys or headers or somesuch... i cant find the program)
...help?

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, even if i couldn't salvage the whole movie

[DarrellS]

My screen capture software will not save files over 2 GB. It's probably too late for you now but what I do is before closing the capture software, I go into windows tempory files and look for the temp file and save it to a folder on my drive.

Like you said, the index will be screwed up so if you captured as DivX/XviD AVI, you can use mpeg4modifier to fix the index.

[pkpara]

in my screen capture software, the temp file saves to a directory of my specification (the drive with the operating system has less than a gig of open space) and is deleted when it is transfered into a viewable file... i think :/

but thank you for suggesting that program, ill give it a go

I seem to be having the most success with virtual dub, anyone know of a way to get it to open/reconstruct other segments of the video? I read somewhere that if a frame is missing it stops the segment there. Is there any way to open the movie and veiw it frame by frame? ... I wouldnt mind going through the 2 hours if it meant saving more of the video

edit: i tried mpeg4 modifier and it reported "exception of type 'system.outofmemoryexception' was thrown", so ill transfer all the files to my other desktop (with better system resources). Also, I'd like to include the fact that im sure the video was longer than the 4 gb, so i dont know what the screen capture did after the filesystem's limit was reached. However, there werent any warnings and it seemed to work just as usual.

edit: i have recorded other files with this screen capture program, so i tested them on mpeg4 modifier. It said "this is not a valid mpeg-4 video (startcode not found at beginning of frame). Codec: CRAM.", so I don't think that this would be the solution.

I also tried VirtualDubMod and it did the same thing as the original one, except it took longer to do it and only resulted in 10 seconds of video

[DarrellS]

You've got a few problems. As long as you don't have enough free space on your drive, you won't be able to capture anything.

CRAM is the worst compression that you can use since the quality is so bad. Change the codec to DivX or XviD in the capture settings. MPEG4Modifier won't work on other compression codecs and it's the only program that I've found that can fix the index.

Using Snagit, sometimes I get a Snagtemp.avi and and snagtemp.wav and if I save them to another folder then I can use Virtualdub to join the audio and the video. Other times, I just get a snagtemp.avi that is both audio and video but I have to use MPEG4Modifier to fix the index before Virtualdub will open the file and I can then edit it.

Try not to capture anything over 45 minutes and you shouldn't have a problem. If you have to, try and capture in two segments if possible.